Republican lawmakers have questioned President Barack Obama's strategy in Iraq warning that the failure to annihilate Islamic extremists now could lead to future attacks on U.S. soil.

'If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you want guys want to call it, they are coming here,' South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News Sunday. 'And if we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.'

'This is turning into, as we had predicted for a long time, a regional
conflict which does pose a threat to the security of the United States
of America,' Arizona Sen. John McCain told CNN.

'What a weak leader,' New York Rep. Peter King said on Meet the Press, adding: 'We're gonna attack this, but we're not gonna do this, we're not gonna do that. Can you imagine Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman [acting like that]?'

President Barack Obama selects a club while golfing at Farm Neck Golf Club, in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha's Vineyard on Sunday. The president spend his weekend golfing as the humanitarian crisis in Iraq raged on

Graham accused Obama of not taking seriously the threat the country faces from ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

'When I look at the map,' he said, 'I think of the United States. I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists' ability to operate in Syria and Iraq.

'Mr. President, if you don't adjust your strategy, these people are coming here,' Graham said.

'What is your strategy to stop these people from attacking the homeland? They have expressed a desire to do so,' he pointed out.

As of Monday morning the U.S. had launched more than a half dozen airstrikes on Islamic militants camped outside of Erbil, the capitol of Kurdistan. It also emerged overnight that the CIA was arming Kurdish forces fighting ISIS.

In a statement on Saturday President Obama said his administration would 'continue to pursue a broader
strategy in Iraq' to protect Americans stationed there from violence and the Iraqi people from mass murder.

'If these terrorists threaten our facilities or our personnel, we will take action to protect our people,' he said.

But McCain said that America's long-term plan in Iraq cannot be made up of reactionary strikes.

'That's not a strategy. That's not a policy. That is simply a very
narrow and focused approach to a problem which is metastasizing as we
speak,' he said.

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If he were Commander in Chief, McCain said he would be arming Syrian rebels and proving as much military assistance to the Kurds as possible.

The 2008 Republican presidential nominee said he also would have left some American troops in Iraq as well, instead of completely withdrawing them in 2011 like Obama.

The resulting situation he said, is 'that there's no leadership' in the Middle East, he said, and 'we are paying a price
for it.' Obama's strategy in Iraq 'is clearly very, very ineffective, to say the least,' McCain said.

King similarly said that Obama's decision to leave Iraq was a fatal mistake.

'The president, he started this. He started this downfall [of Iraq] in 2011 with direct withdraw of American troops,' King said.

'This president talks about ending the war in Iraq, all he ended was American influence in Iraq. And that's a failure, and it's on his hands.'

An Iraqi official said on Sunday that ISIS had killed at least 500 followers of the Yazidi religion in the last week, including 40 children, some of whom were buried alive. The total number of Iraqis executed by ISIS since it began it's rampage is unknown.

Volunteers from Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take up their position as they fight against the militants from the Islamic State in northern Iraq on Sunday. The U.S. military attacked Islamic State targets throughout the weekend to aid Kurdish fighters, but Republican lawmakers say the Obama administration needs to doing more to help the Iraqis destroy ISIS

Yazidi refugees from Iraq are pictured here on Saturday at a temporary camp in Nerwan in south-eastern Turkey. The site is currently home to around 350 Yazidis escaping violence by ISIS militants

President Obama hit back at critics on Saturday claiming that the humanitarian crisis in Iraq could have been avoided if he had left a residual force in Iraq two and a half years ago.

'That
entire analysis is bogus and wrong but it gets frequently peddled around
here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies
that they themselves made,' he said.

Obama explained that he did not sign an agreement with the Iraqi government to allow U.S. troops to remain in the country because they wouldn't have received the necessary legal protections.

'The
only difference would be we’d have a bunch of troops on the ground that
would be vulnerable,' Obama said. 'And however many troops we had,
we would have to now be reinforcing, I’d have to be protecting them,
and we’d have a much bigger job.

'And
probably, we would end up having to go up again in terms of the number
of grounds troops to make sure that those forces were not vulnerable.'

The president placed the blame for the current situation on the Iraqi government, saying that had it not 'alienated'
the Sunni population in the country, the Islamic militants wouldn't
have been so successful at destroying the country.

Obama has repeatedly said that until a new, more inclusive government forms in Iraq, he would not aid the country militarily - a strategy King said threatened the United States' security.

'We can't 'sit back and let ISIS attack the United States' because Iraqi officials didn't do their job, he said.

Minutes after his remarks on Saturday about the state of affairs in Iraq, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughter Malia flew to the secluded Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard for a two week vacation.

By the time the U.S. made four more airstrikes in Iraq that afternoon, President Obama was on the golf course, leading Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to dub him the 'absentee
President'.

'I
think the president should actually stand up and do his job as
commander in chief, should spend less time on the golf course and more
time doing the job to which he was elected,' Cruz told attendees of the Iowa State Fair.

'I
am glad the president is finally demonstrating some leadership, taking
the threat from ISIS seriously, but unfortunately, he’s following the
pattern that has characterized his foreign policy from the beginning of
this tenure which he has laid out no clearly defined objective that
we’re trying to accomplish that is key to defending U.S. national
security,' Cruz said.

He went on to accuse Obama of 'not providing that leadership.'

The president is scheduled to appear at a Democratic Party fundraiser today in Martha's Vineyard before taking the rest of the week off to play golf and spend time with his family.

Next Sunday he'll return to Washington for two days to attend what the White House would only describe as 'meetings,' but he'll then head back to Massachusetts for five more days of vacation.